The Stills

by Jess Montgomery

  Knowing how much Klara has George’s ear and not wishing to suffer George’s wrath, Fiona hastens to add, “I mean tending to everyone here.” Besides Fiona and Klara, George had sent on ahead three of his men, but no additional kitchen help for Klara. Fiona says as sweetly as possible, “Please tell my aunt Nell to get on her coat and meet me by the kitchen door?”

  Klara doesn’t budge from the doorway. “Why?”

  None of your business. Fiona looks down at her scarf, fusses with it, so Klara can’t see the irritation mounting in Fiona’s expression, and gives the most basic answer possible that’s still true. “I want to go with her to visit my uncle’s grave.”

  “But Mr. Vogel will be here soon, I’m sure—”

  It’s true; George and his two top yes-men are supposed to arrive at any moment.

  In fact, they should already be here.

  The image of George’s shiny automobile skidding off an icy road on a treacherous hairpin turn, tumbling into a deep ravine, the occupants dying bloody and broken upon impact at the bottom, slides across Fiona’s mind. Instead of despair, the notion prompts relief—though she knows that if George dies, she will only get a small stipend. The bulk of his estate will be divided between Klara and his right-hand man, Abe Miller—a fact that rankles.

  She’d briefly considered, after the doctor told her she was with child, using her pregnancy to have George amend his will in her favor. It had been her first thought. Her next had been no—George would likely leave the bulk in trust to the child, and her that same small stipend.

  She wants more. So much more. And she’s put together a plan to get it.

  “He’ll expect to see you here,” Klara continues.

  He’ll expect that I’ve buttered up Aunt Nell. Sending Fiona and Klara to help prepare the house for a Thanksgiving feast was a ruse; Fiona’s task was much more important than that. Those hairpin turns en route had retriggered the morning sickness she thought she’d gotten past weeks before. She’d been so relieved when her and Klara’s driver had finally pulled onto the gravel drive to the farm that she’d only caught a flash of Aunt Nell in the parlor, before rushing upstairs to her childhood room, eager to lie down, for her head to stop spinning.

  Aunt Nell had not checked on her, not once.

  “I need to talk with Aunt Nell,” Fiona says firmly. “George expects that as well.”

  “You can talk to her here,” Klara says. “Where it’s warmer. Safer. George also expects that you’ll be in good health. These hills are steep.” Klara’s tone implies that the hills are purposefully willful, just to defy her. She gives another pinch-lipped smile as she looks pointedly at Fiona’s belly. “Wouldn’t want you to slip or fall.”

  Fiona’s face flares in a rush of heat, feeling exposed, as if Klara had seen her moment of envisioning George dead in a ravine. Or somehow suspects that— No, Fiona can’t just talk with Aunt Nell here, in the house, full of eavesdropping ears. Between bouts of sickness, the past two days have given Fiona ample time to rethink George’s plan—which Fiona had triggered with a casual suggestion in the first place. To revise it to better suit her own desires. No, she could not talk with Aunt Nell here.

  “Just do as I ask!” Fiona snaps. She turns back to the mirror, tugs on one end of the scarf, tries again to make a bow.

  Klara remains in the doorway, still holding the chamber pot. The expression on her face imparts that she’d love to just fling it at Fiona. Instead, she tosses this zinger: “If I may say, you’re starting to remind me of Nina.”

  Fiona pauses, each hand clasping one end of the scarf.

  “Nina Vogel. The first Mrs. Vogel.”

  Fiona’s gut clenches. Oh. She’d nearly forgotten that she’s George’s second wife, the first having died just months before Fiona and George met, in the spring of 1926. Nina Vogel. What was her maiden name? Her history? Fiona doesn’t know; she’d heard only a brief explanation that she’d existed, and then only in terms of being George’s wife, and that there’d been no children.

  Through innuendo and gossip among the wives of George’s yes-men, Fiona had learned that the first Mrs. Vogel had settled for a paltry allowance in a divorce and later died alone from a heart attack in a dingy walk-up apartment in Cincinnati.

  Well, Fiona’s much younger, healthier—despite morning sickness—than the first Mrs. Vogel, and has no intentions of settling for a paltry allowance, whether through divorce or widowhood.

  Which leaves two options. Fall into line under George—or outwit him and take control of as much of his assets as she can.

  “Too bad she never got pregnant,” Klara says. “That might have kept her from becoming restless in her marriage.”

  Fiona swallows back a gasp. She hasn’t told anyone, not even George, about her pregnancy. Only she and the Cincinnati doctor who’d confirmed the pregnancy are aware of her condition, carrying a late-in-life baby—she is, after all, thirty-seven, with a fifteen-year-old son from her first marriage. She’d explained away or hidden earlier bouts of morning sickness, planned to chalk this latest round up to the twisty-turny automobile ride. Truth be told, she’s holding back the news because she wants to reveal it when it will be most useful.

  Fiona says, “I’ve been sick because of the awful ride over—”

  Klara’s laugh is a short burst. “No one stays road sick for two days,” Klara says. “My point is, if she hadn’t gotten so restless,” by which, Fiona thinks, the woman must mean disobedient, or maybe the woman had an affair, which George of course would not tolerate, no matter his own shenanigans, “or had at least had a child, then George would have not gotten rid of her.”

  Turning from the mirror to Klara, Fiona smiles. “Why, Klara, it sounds like you want to give me advice to keep me around!”

  Klara inhales sharply, taken aback. “No, well, I—I just mean—” She stands up straighter, tilts her chin up. “It is not good to disappoint Mr. Vogel, and the worst way to disappoint him is to keep from him things that he’d want to know.”

  The foolish old woman means it as a warning, but Fiona takes a different understanding—Klara will pass on to George any news, information, or gossip she thinks George might find interesting or useful. Good to know.

  Fiona’s expression hardens, slit only by a clenched smile. “Yes. We don’t want to disappoint Mr. Vogel.” Her hands move so suddenly in another attempt at tying a bow that Klara jumps just a little. Fiona yanks the loops, hard. “I’d hate to tell him you didn’t support me in the one task he asked of me—talking with my own aunt.”

  “I’m sure I can convince your aunt to take a break from cooking with me to get some fresh air,” Klara says.

  Fiona turns back to the mirror as Klara departs. Well, the bow is still lopsided, but at least this knot is so tight the scarf is not at risk of coming untied.

  Moments later, Fiona walks down the hallway past the other bedrooms—there were a generous four of them, repurposed as sewing and storage rooms, except for Aunt Nell’s bedroom of course, but now reverted back to their original purpose as George Vogel’s people took over the farmhouse for what is supposed to be—as far as Aunt Nell knows—a Thanksgiving visit. Fiona and George will share her old room, George’s top men another, Klara with one to herself, and the three men who are already here have cots in the attic.

  After Fiona read of Uncle Henry’s sudden death in the Kinship Daily Courier, which Fiona has mailed to her Cincinnati home—her only ongoing tie to her old life in Kinship—George had insisted on the holiday visit.

  She’s alone now. She’ll want family. You’re her only niece. And perhaps I can help her out…, he’d said. But I need you to convince her …

  Fiona had been at once irritated and surprised. Irritated, because he said it as if the notion of helping her out was his idea, when it was she who’d broached it, months before. And surprised because at the time he’d seemed to dismiss it, and then he’d brought it up again, putting pressure on Fiona to help.

  Now, as Fiona des
cends to the parlor, she clutches the handrail, takes each step carefully. She’s wearing the most practical shoes she’d brought—T-strap, low heel—but they aren’t really suitable for climbing an Appalachian hill in early winter. Oh, how much she’d forgotten about living here. How quickly it all comes rushing back.

  She walks through the parlor, where three of her husband’s lower-level men—they serve as drivers and bodyguards—drink whiskey, smoke cigars, and play poker. One of them gives her an appraising look.

  Fiona stops cold, stares him down. “Get your feet off my aunt’s table. And if you’re going to smoke, do it outside!” That had been, after all, Aunt Nell’s rule for Uncle Henry.

  Fiona might be the second Mrs. Vogel and perhaps the first had put up with disrespectful behavior, but she won’t. The man with the offending feet sits up, and all three put out their stogies.

  In the kitchen, Klara scrubs her hands at the pump sink, presumably having just cleaned Fiona’s chamber pot. Klara doesn’t give Fiona so much as a scant glance, though she nods toward the door between the kitchen and the mudroom.

  Fiona hurries out through the mudroom. Even before the door slams shut behind her, Fiona abruptly stops at a cold slap of wind, at snow prickling her cheeks and hands, and belatedly realized she hadn’t grabbed her coat and hat from the rack in the parlor. Well, she’s not going back to the parlor now, give George’s men a reason to sneer at her, even though her arms are already cold in the thin sleeves of her dress, the silk scarf providing modesty but no warmth. But Aunt Nell is already yards ahead of Fiona, making good time in thick, practical work boots and a wool coat. Aunt Nell is already past the big barn, plunging up the hill just behind it. Soon she’ll be out of sight.

  Fiona plunges on, too, in the spitting snow toward the barn.

  If George has his way, it will soon be emptied out. An extension will be added—more men will come to work with the ones already here—even in this cold weather, right after Thanksgiving, a tunnel dug out in the hill behind the barn, a new dirt and gravel road made to connect with the county road on the other side of the hill. One remote dirt road on the way in, ancient Osage trees on either side lacing their gnarly limbs over the road to form a natural canopy, another dirt road through buckwheat and cornfields for the way out, both entrance and egress heavily guarded. The timber and the workmen were all set to go. Once Aunt Nell signs over the property, the modifications will take a week. George, after all, employed nearly two thousand men scattered from Chicago to St. Louis to Cincinnati, and his new plans here would push his business south and east.

  Fiona only knows this because George had gone over the plans in detail with her. She’d triggered the whole plan one night after dinner, lingering at the big cherry table, sipping her port, hearing George talk about his frustration over needing an additional storage and distribution location for Vogel’s Tonic outside of Cincinnati, the medicinal comprising a small percentage of alcohol and mostly water with a few herbs completely legal under the Volstead Act that oversees the enforcement of Prohibition of alcoholic spirits for all but a few uses—manufacturing and medicinal, for example.

  George had complained a few months ago that he couldn’t seem to pinpoint a place both hidden enough and within access of decent roads for the operation.

  My uncle Henry and aunt Nell’s place, where I grew up…, Fiona had said, so softly that at first she thought George and Abe Miller—his right-hand man—hadn’t heard her. Then she realized they’d forgotten her presence at the table. Easy for them to do, she’d come to realize.

  But George had heard. For weeks after, he kept grilling her on her memory of the lay of her aunt and uncle’s land—any stone faces, creeks, cemeteries, copses of trees to avoid? Other neighbors?

  The matter dropped—until Fiona read of Uncle Henry’s death in the Kinship newspaper. Upon George pressing her as to the reason for her woeful expression—Don’t I provide enough jewelry? Furs? Help so you don’t have to raise a finger?—Fiona had shared the news.

  That’s when George insisted they must go visit Aunt Nell, feigning concern. Of course, he wanted to check out the land. See if he could buy it cheap from a grieving widow. Fiona’s letter had merely explained that she and George so wanted to visit for Thanksgiving. See how she was doing after Uncle Henry’s passing.

  Aunt Nell had no doubt expected just the two of them and Fiona’s son, Leon, from her first marriage—not a whole entourage. At the last minute, George told her that he would not bring Leon back from boarding school for such a brief holiday. Maybe, he’d said, for Christmas.

  When Fiona at last reaches the top of the hill, she enters Sandy Creek Cemetery through the wooden gate and crosses to her aunt standing next to Uncle Henry’s fresh, unmarked grave. Aunt Nell stares silently across the hollow, her breath remarkably even. Fiona, panting from the effort of the climb, looks in the same direction. There, beyond the farmhouse and outbuildings, a copse of trees alongside the lane to the farmhouse. The dirt road, not far off the main road. Another hill to the west, rolling soft and low, thick with dark trees, the trees limned with snow, the limbs reaching for her. Oh, she knows this hill all too well. For on that hill, among those trees, is the cabin where she’d been born, only child of a sorrowful woman and a cruel, bitter man. Her father. Aunt Nell’s brother.

  Aunt Nell, too, had grown up in that cabin, when it had belonged to her parents before her brother inherited it. In this squalor and despair she and Fiona are bonded, both escaping awful beginnings: Nell not going far in physical distance yet so very far in the quiet life she’d found with Uncle Henry; Fiona at first finding respite a little farther away, in Kinship, with her first husband, kind and gentle Martin.

  It strikes her, how alike Martin and Henry had been in spirit. How thoughtless she’d been to demand that Aunt Nell speak with her here, in the cemetery where Uncle Henry is buried, and from which they could both espy the location of their hurtful beginnings.

  Fiona feels as if she’s spinning, along with the snow, and for a moment the tree limbs across the way seem grasping, as if they might pluck her off this hill and fling her back into the horrid cabin she’d run from so long ago.

  Fiona startles at a slight sound, like a wren’s piping call, but no, it’s a sound from deep within her, a whimper. She jumps as if slapped, although Aunt Nell’s hand alights gently on her arm, blessedly warm and solacing. The old woman’s hard gaze softens with concern as she gives Fiona’s abdomen a knowing look. “You need to take care of yourself, so you can take care of your child.”

  Fiona pulls away, stares down at the hard, resolute earth, crusted with clinging snow. So much for waiting for the right time to tell George. She’s fooled no one, at least not the women around her.

  “Does he know?” Aunt Nell asks.

  “I plan to tell him when the time is right! George will be thrilled. He’ll be a good father. He’s been so good to Leon.…”

  Has he? She’s told herself all along that her choice to be with George was as much for Leon as for herself. A new thought grabs her so hard it rattles her more fiercely than the wind: What would Martin think of how she’d agreed—eagerly, even—to George’s suggestion that her son, Leon, should go away to a fine private boys’ school in Philadelphia? The boy had sobbed at the train station the first time he left, George’s man Abe Miller nearly having to strong-arm him across the platform.

  Aunt Nell’s eyes widen at Fiona’s notable tremor, and she shrugs off her coat, shoves it at Fiona. “You have to take care of yourself,” Aunt Nell says, “for the baby.” Then she proffers a small smile. “Since the change, I welcome cold more often than not.”

  Not wishing to squander this bit of intimacy by deflecting the offer, Fiona takes the coat and drapes it over her shoulders. A scent—Aunt Nell’s soap and lily of the valley, an old scent Fiona recognizes from her childhood—wafts from deep within the garment’s fibers. Life with her aunt and uncle hadn’t been all coldness. There had been sweet moments.…

 
“Of course Mr. Vogel wants the best for dear Leon,” Aunt Nell is saying, though her patronizing tone makes it clear that she does not truly believe this. “And I know that you do, too. You always did have a soft spot.” Her voice softens to show that this she does believe.

  Fiona blinks hard, sniffles from the hard wind driving across her face. She knows what her aunt alludes to … that candy dish … but it’s best not to think of that now. She refocuses on the matter at hand: yes, yes, she had wanted the best for Leon, opportunities to do more with his life than sweat it away on a few acres of tobacco or buckwheat or, even worse, deep in one of the coal mines, or—if he was lucky—run a small business like Martin had, a shoe repair shop. The business, being a deputy for Daniel Ross, and being her husband and Leon’s father had been a big enough life for him—yet a life so small that George wouldn’t even have recognized it as a dust speck floating in the corner of his eye. She had thought it, if not a big life, a comfortable one, and she’d been glad for her peaceful, cozy niche in it, until Martin died in the line of duty, working for Sheriff Lily Ross.

  “Martin was a good man,” she says. “But a soft man. Weak in some ways. George, though—well, you’ll see when you meet him. He’s strong, and, well, efficient. He knows how to get things done, and—and…” She stutters to a stop, unsure how to describe her husband.

  At first in their courtship and marriage, she’d been happy—eager, even—to disappear in the cool grayness of his enveloping shadow. She romanticized it as a cover for a tender heart she’d surely soon be privy to. When she’d discovered him with another woman—one of the many acolytes who hover around the periphery of George’s world—she quickly learned that his coolness was not an act. It emanated from a cold heart.

  He’d laughed after she demanded he stop his affairs. Laughed again after she said, well then, she’d divorce him and just enjoy living on a generous alimony. Struck her. Then he’d grabbed her shoulders and said, Never threaten me, my little spitfire.